Discuss at least three mechanisms that can be used to counteract staff burnout with respect to incident response.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

It is important to counteract staff burnout by providing opportunities for learning and growth. Suggestions for building and maintaining skills are:

- Budget enough funding to maintain, enhance, and expand proficiency in technical areas and security disciplines as well as less technical topics, such as the legal aspects of incident response. Consider sending each full-time team member to at least two technical conferences per year and each part-time team member to at least one.

- Ensure the availability of books, magazines, and other technical references that promote deeper technical knowledge.

- Give team members opportunities to perform other tasks, such as creating educational materials, conducting security awareness workshops, writing software tools to assist system administrators in detecting incidents, and conducting research.

- Consider rotating staff members in and out of the CSIRT.

- Maintain sufficient staffing so that team members can have uninterrupted time off work (e.g., vacations).

- Create a mentoring program to enable senior technical staff to help less experienced staff learn incident handling.

- Participate in exchanges in which team members temporarily trade places with others (e.g., network administrators) to gain new technical skills.

- Occasionally bring in outside experts (e.g., contractors) with deep technical knowledge in needed areas, as funding permits.

- Develop incident-handling scenarios and have the team members discuss how they would handle them.

- Conduct simulated incident-handling exercises for the team. Exercises are particularly important because they not only improve the performance of the incident handlers, but also identify issues with policies and procedures and with communication.